I talk a lot about how “empathy” in commercial UX is mostly a posture because in reality capitalism doesn’t care, but it’s important to consider the additional problem of people in charge who are too shallow to be capable of understanding “why” some people prefer, or need, to do things differently than they do.
This one time I was telling the ceo/founder of a startup I worked for that our react app was making my new macbook pro crawl and we need to fix that because it was a b2b product that would be used by people in finance offices decked out with dell opticrap machines. He responded with surprise “wow, steve. you really care about people don’t you?”
I was kinda floored. Anyway, here we are…
https://web.archive.org/web/20230727121010/https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1684491212219359232
@fasterandworse He has probably fired every employee that has accommodations or visible disabilities, except for the one person he had to rehire because he enraged an entire country after firing him.
I mean dark mode aside, the dude is a proud eugenicist, so I can’t imagine accessibility is one of his priorities.
Yep, totally agree. I shared this link with no surprise that he’s like this. Just wanted to highlight one of those moments that are a giveaway to this kind of person.
I’ve successfully convinced front-end designers to have empathy in the past, especially younger ones who really hadn’t spent time thinking about other people’s tech needs. Hell, back when I was A Youth™️, I had my own boneheaded takes about people who use tech in a way I don’t (vi/emacs wars, lol, I’m old).
But yeah, exactly, Musk isn’t in “assume good intent” or “teachable moment”. He has for years been 100% in “when people tell you who they are, believe them.”
I like how you put it. When you spend enough time around these people you can hear them drop a lie about their lunch and have enough information to know they will screw anyone over in a heartbeat.
Freedom means not having a choice in website color scheme.
“b-bht what good is it having the freedom to do what I want if I can’t force other people to agree with me?! I thought I was the king?!”
Nothing is going to change with this perpetual man child until the world stops paying attention to his little tantrums.
Dark mode makes me irrationally angry. Doesn’t matter what app or service it is, I just despise it. I can’t even really explain why. It just looks so bad.
It does have a habit of showing up in software designed For Gamers, so that would go a way in explaining that.
Did he get cucked by a vision impaired person recently or what.
He got publicly embarrassed by a disabled person, I know that much. But he would have been like this anyway.
Haraldur Thorleifsson? Thanks, I forgot about that whole debacle. Though my post was more of a riff on the meme that he got transphobic after Grimes ran away with Chelsea Manning.
he got transphobic far earlier, one of his kids came out and he’s been malding since
Ok knowing that I will be slammed for this but, what’s the problem with not having a light mode?
nothing wrong with not having one. Having one and removing it because you like the dark mode better, on the other hand? He’s been told that every design decision has to consider light and dark. Just like he’s going to be told that the web app requires more dev resources for browser compatibility testing, accessibility, performance etc and more design resources for responsiveness and stuff like mouse vs touch.
If he drops light mode he can cut more staff for sure. If he drops web, he can cut even more. He will do it.
but anyway, light mode/dark mode are a great example of corps doing something good in the bare minimum way. Before apple or whoever branded black backgrounds and white text as “dark mode” implementing an alternative UI theme based on accessibility concerns on a major web app would have been impossible to get approved.
You guys are speaking in the sense that he wants to keep Twitter as is, but consensus is that he wants to create a super app from Twitter, so the developers will need to design and redesign a lot of what is currently done. If you remove a light scheme from the equation and just develop everything for dark mode development (design, coding, etc) will be faster.
I’m speaking in the sense that he’s a desperate idiot trying to make twitter cost him as little as possible. He’s walking around that hell hole asking for ideas on cutting costs.
For sure he wants it to be profitable ASAP. Cutting development costs will help on that.
Except if you cut development costs your app will suffer, and thus be less profitable. If people don’t want to use your app because it’s a pain to use, then you’re cutting out a part of your userbase… and thus a source of profit.
Not scaring off advertisers with fascism could also work.
but fascism is a core functionality!
For some it’s just personal preference, for some with vision issues it’s unreadable
What’s the benefit to removing one and forcing everyone to use the other?
The benefit would be less work for his tech team, maybe less lines of code as well. They probably also have metrics on that and know what percentage of users just straight up switched to dark mode, so could be it.
For some with vision issues, couldn’t the “dim” mode help?
If “X” can’t handle a light mode and a dark mode, then that’s not a very good sign…
You’re acting like they need to code a whole new app rather than a single if/then statements with different color values.
Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?
don’t underestimate the work that goes into maintaining two UI themes on that level. Every new thing has to cater for both themes by the designers. Those colour values are easy for devs IF the css is built to accommodate. It very rarely is… and by rarely I mean never, but say rarely to appease the devs seeing this who think they’ve built something that accommodates it.
You set up a table for each.
If you’re adding one thing that needs a color value, you just add a color to each table rather than a single color…
It’s honestly not complicated or time consuming. Especially when two versions already exist…
For the love of… they are freaking twitter! It is one of the most used user interfaces in the world! I think they can spring for the necessary dev resources to maintain a UI that can support multiple modes.
